nity. While in previous years the Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction symposium has
only explicitly solicited novel computational work,
this year’s symposium also solicited contributions
from social scientists, philosophers, and industry
professionals to promote discussion and cohesion
within the multidisciplinary community interested
in the intersection of AI and human-robot interaction.

The majority of papers presented at the symposium addressed novel computational mechanisms
that enable robots to take better physical actions in
the world, better perceive the structure of the world
or interactions within the world, or better engage in
linguistic interactions with human users. Moreover, a
shared set of motivations emerged, as the majority of
the contributions sought to either make interactions
safer, make interactions smoother, or allow robots to
learn better from humans. In addition, a number of
papers were presented at the intersection of these
areas. These papers presented novel computational
mechanisms that enable robots to better perceive
human actions to take better physical actions, better
understand natural language to take better physical
actions, or better generate natural language to communicate the robot’s perceptions.

Finally, a number of submissions explored broader
concerns in HRI, such as the concepts of trust,
explainability, and reflection, or metaconcerns such
as relations with other fields and practices within the
field. These topics proved to spark the greatest
amount of discussion, and all authors that presented
full talks had the opportunity to comment on the
relation between their own research and these larger
concerns over the course of the author panels that
followed each session of paper presentations. These
author panels provided a space for authors and audience to engage in open conversation regarding the
details and motivations of individual papers, the connections within each set of papers, and the relation
between those papers and the evolving field of
human-robot interaction.

There was further opportunity to discuss theseissues through the invited speakers, who came fromvarious aspects of the AI-HRI community andexposed the entire group to current issues and rele-vant works in their area. Many of these presentationswere given in a debate format where two invitedspeakers presented a variety of views on their issuesof choice, including playing devil’s advocate to theirown opinions and preferences. Topics ranged fromquestioning the relevance between AI and HRI toidentifying the best practices and future for AI-HRIresearch with respect to design, cognition, humaninvolvement and roles, and improving the safety andcomfort of interactive experiences. After each pres-entation, breakout sessions and group discussionschallenged the participants to think deeper about theissues and come up with their own insights to shareafterwards. The speakers even joined the groups toengage and help spark the conversations that oftencontinued during the coffee breaks.This year’s Artificial Intelligence for Human-RobotInteraction symposium builds on the successes ofprevious years, and further paves the path forresearch innovation and community growth foryears to come.

Ross Mead and Dan Grollman served as general
chairs, Tom Williams and Patrícia Alves-Oliveira
served as program committee chairs, and Rick Freedman as panel chair of the symposium. The papers of
the symposium were published by AAAI Press as
Technical Report FS-16-01 within the compilation
titled The 2016 AAAI Fall Symposium Series: Technical
Reports FS-16-01 – FS-16-05.

Cognitive Assistance in Governmentand Public Sector ApplicationsThe concept of a cognitive assistant as a partner tohelp humans perform their work better dates to theearly days of AI, including the 1960s writings of Dou-glas Engelbart and J. C. R. Licklider. For the sake ofthis symposium, cognitive assistance was defined as“a systematic approach to improving performance oncomplex tasks that require the processing of largeamounts of information in which people andmachines are treated as complementary cosystemsworking together.” Building on the successful 2015AAAI Fall Symposium on Cognitive Assistance, sym-posium organizers worked to expand the dialogbetween the user, academic, and commercial com-munities to increase understanding of the best prac-tices and barriers to the adoption of such systems.Last year’s presentations largely dealt with ideas. Thisyear, attendees heard about systems in actual use andthe adoption of such systems. Also, notable this yearwas increased focus on specific professions anddomains, including law and the courts, patent pro-cessing, teaching, health, cybersecurity, aviation, airtraffic control, defense, and intelligence.

The symposium also included three invited talks.
Mark Maybury (vice president, MITRE) opened with
historical context and then talked about goals
(increased prosperity, safety, happiness) and challenges (transparency, trustworthiness, privacy and
security, and control versus the triad of confidence,
threat, and potential consequences). Ed Felten
(deputy US chief technical officer) talked about the
need for the AI community to inform the process in
the areas of risks, employment, fairness, and justice.
He encourated the community, as it moves forward
with cognitive assistance, to consider such questions
as: Does it work? Is it fair? and Is it acceptable to the
public? Guru Banavar (vice president, IBM Research)
discussed the meaning of expertise in the 21st century and how cognitive systems can help experts make
better decisions. He suggested the need to integrate